Anthony Thwaite
Anthony Thwaite (1930 – 2021) spent his childhood in Yorkshire, the USA (1940-44) and Somerset. After national service in Libya he read English at Oxford. He then married and went to Japan for two years, where he taught English Literature at Tokyo University. Since then he was a BBC radio producer, literary editor of the Listener and the New Statesman, co-editor of Encounter, and in 1986 was chairman of the Booker Prize judges. He is a literary executor of Philip Larkin and the editor of his Collected Poems. He was a regular reviewer for The Guardian and other journals. In 1990 he was made an OBE for services to poetry.
Going Out
Going Out
At eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite said that Going Out was likely to be the last book of poems he published in his lifetime, and that the title was apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book's contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends, and draw on memories, hard-won faith, and self-questioning. As Michael Frayn put it, Thwaite 'writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present – and the...
£9.99
A Move in the Weather
A collection that is both moving and funny, elegiac and playful. The personal poems span a life-time as Thwaite relives moments of childhood, or reassesses his role as son to a dying mother, or gets told how to behave by his grandson. Elsewhere he laments his old cat and conjures up a Sumerian Anthology of poets. The principal concern of the collection is what lasts and what vanishes: dreams, memories, people and objects. In this quest, he takes us with him to Italy, Siberia and Syria, and is haunted by the mystery of places ‘where there are no words’. It...
£7.95